I'm no expert, but as someone that has drooled over Armenian I can't pass up the opportunity to say something.

I believe the grammar and vocabulary is a bit different, but to what extent I don't know. Also, the phonology is a bit simplified in Western Armenian.

If you're looking at East Armenian you'll find to writing systems in use. The Reformed spelling in use in Armenia (which is what most modern resources use to teach you) and the traditional spelling in use by some of the diaspora communities and in use by the Western Armenians. ( At least I think that's right )

I'd have a better answer for the question if I knew what you were trying to get at by asking it. For instance, are you wondering if it would be possible to mix and match learning materials for both Eastern and Western Armenian without getting confused?

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

linguoboy wrote:I'd have a better answer for the question if I knew what you were trying to get at by asking it. For instance, are you wondering if it would be possible to mix and match learning materials for both Eastern and Western Armenian without getting confused?

Basically, yeah, and whether I'd be able to comfortably make use of vocabulary I'd learned if I didn't know which dialect it was from.

linguoboy wrote:I'd have a better answer for the question if I knew what you were trying to get at by asking it. For instance, are you wondering if it would be possible to mix and match learning materials for both Eastern and Western Armenian without getting confused?

Basically, yeah, and whether I'd be able to comfortably make use of vocabulary I'd learned if I didn't know which dialect it was from.

I wouldn't think so. Phonology isn't much of an issue with written materials: Western Armenian script preserves all the Eastern Armenian distinctions even if it ignores some in pronunciation. (Of course, this makes the mapping from speech to symbol more complex for W. Armenian.) But verb conjugation is substantially different between the two varieties. And my impression from the materials I've used is that a lot of common vocabulary in one variety wouldn't be recognised by speakers of the other. (And that's apart from the issue of recent loanwords, which in the case of E. Armenian are predominately from Russian and in W. Armenian will vary according to the speakers' country of residence.)

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

In my experience, I've seen native speakers of different dialects of Armenian be able to communicate with one another, but as a learner of Eastern Armenian, I couldn't make heads or tails of Western Armenian. When I was studying in Yerevan I met a Western Armenian speaker from Syria who had recently moved to Armenia. I had such difficulty understanding anything he said in Armenian that we had to use Arabic to communicate as he didn't know English. He told me that he was able to understand Eastern Armenian, and when I asked other Armenians they said that Western Armenian was not so difficult for them to understand either.

I agree you should stick to one dialect and stick with it. But if your interested when I was studdying Armenian there was a book called, "Armenian for Everyone" which teaches both dialects. I didn't get very far in it, so I don't know how good it is though But they have it at amazon if you want to check it out:

In handwriting and cursive, զ /z/ is always spelled like in your textbook, otherwise it is very easy to confuse with ջ /d͡ʒ/. It’s just specific to this font. ‘Hello’ should indeed be spelled բարև instead of բարեւ, but in practice, as you can see, not everyone follows this rule

I don't know. I just like parev better than barev And somehow I started learning the western variety and the eastern seemed a little bit more difficult to understand, but I can't really tell, because I don't know much past the "Hi. How are you? Are you Armenian and do you speak it? I'm good. Goodbye." yet.